Saturday, 14 June 2014

In the previous post we have seen about Tor and how we can stay anonymous on the Internet. But in case it is blocked by your network administrator then how to unblock it ? Don't worry here is the solution for that problem.

Reason to block Tor

*. Due to the rising popularity of the Tor application, lot of colleges, companies and organization started to block even Tor.

*. They mostly block access to all the publicly known relay servers. If network administrator blocked access to these relay servers then Tor would stopped working and you would not be able to connect to any blocked website on the Internet.

*. You can see complete list of Tor relay servers on the Vidalia Control Panel by clicking on View the Network button.How to unblock TorIf Tor relay servers blocked, then there are Bridge Relays come to the rescue. Bridge Relays are Tor Relay servers (Onion routers) that are normally not published in the public network list. They are hidden servers which are unknown to anyone of us and even the network administrator and so that they would not necessarily blocked.

To find Tor bridge Relay servers or Tor Bridges there are two ways as follows:

*. If the above webpage is blocked then you may request for Tor bridges by email. For this send an email to bridges@torproject.org with the line get bridges in the body of email and make sure to send this email by your Gmail or Yahoo account because any other email account will not be accepted. Within few minutes for should receive a reply containing some bridges that you can use. But sometimes this method doesn't work, you can use other devices like mobiles phone to access the webpage and get the bridges if Tor webpage is blocked in your organization.

Once you have received Tor Bridges information you need to configure the Tor application to use these new bridges.

To do this open Vidalia Control Panel > Settings > Network and select the option My ISP Blocks connection to the Tor network. Now you will be presented by a box below, where you can add IP addresses of the new Tor bridges. It is a recommendation for you that add as many bridge as you can to make it harder for your college, company or organization to block you.

Some network administrators also block the various ports that Tor uses for communication.

In such case, it is possible to force Tor to use Port 80 and Port 443 for all its communication. Port 80 and 443 are normally not blocked because these ports are the default ports that are needed for Internet communication. To configure this option go to Vidalia Control Panel > Settings > Network and select the option My Firewall only lets me connect to certain Ports.Mostly this will resolve the issue of blocking.